Farrago

Friday, 21 April 2017

Aside from the state motto of New Mexico, crescit eundo, there is the motto of Millfield School in Somerset: molire molendo '(Loosely translated as "to succeed by grinding")'. 'Loosely', of course, because since molior is a deponent verb, molire is a second-person singular indicative or, better for this context, an imperative. The infinitive, as implied by the loose translation, is moliri.

As for the gerundive, and real Latin, there is the formula found in Pompeian electoral dipinti:

In their notes, Paton and Hicks wrote, 'The same idea is more fully, and more fulsomely, expressed in two inscriptions, Dittenberger, Sylloge (2nd ed.), No. 279 (Cyzicus), and Papers of the American Institute, i. p. 133 (Assos)'.

Wednesday, 29 June 2016

According to LSJ s.v. ἀπο-λούω, Hesychius glossed ἀπολουσέμεναι· κολ[λ]οβώσειν (Cypr.). That would involve a (1) Lesbian infinitive in -(ε)μεναι for (2) a thematic verb (3) in Cypriot. Therein are three surprises (see Buck, Greek Dialects, sections 154.2 and 155.2-3). Cf. the glossing of athematic σπελλάμεναι by Hesychius as στειλάμεναι.

[The latter is otherwise only in the grammatical tradition, as in Herodian: παρ’ Αἰολεῦσι δὲ τῶν ἀμεταβόλων γίνεται, ἀγείρω ἀγέρρω, ἐγείνατο ἐγέννατο, στειλάμεναι στελλάμεναι, εἷμα ἕμμα καὶ τοῦ σ τοσοῦτον τοσσοῦτον.]The entry in Hesychius simply reads (as per TLG): (6466)ἀπολουσέμεν· κολοβώσεινΦ 455 v. l.Il.21.455 reads, στεῦτο δ’ ὅ γ’ ἀμφοτέρων ἀπολεψέμεν οὔατα χαλκῷ, preceded by a diple. There may well be less sense in 'to wash off ears with a sword' than in ἀπολεψέμεν 'to lop off...' or to 'peel off...'. There is no -αι after -μεν and no reference to Cypriots.

That said, Schmidt ed.min. tells me that the codex has -μεναι· κολλοβῶσιν. His entry ends '(Κύπριοι)'.

Here, though, is an example of a -σεμεν infinitive as a future, not as a sigmatic aorist (thematic aorists are different again in this regard).

Tuesday, 28 June 2016

'It is commonly admitted that the parent language possessed an adjectival suffix *-es- which served to create compound adjectives from neuter s-stem nouns. The type is usually illustrated by pointing to equations like δυσμενής = Skt. (not RV) durmanas-, Gatha-Av. dužmanah-, Late Av. dušmanah 'having an evil mind' from which a nom. sg. *dus-menēs is reconstructable.'

An Internet forum featured a discussion of the origins, spread, and modern use of this word in Hindi, Urdu, and beyond, especially on as spoken by a correspondent's grand-mother (!). More at Wiktionary, s.v.

Colvin's reference must be VI 46 (near the end of that column: see above), where Schwyzer, DGE 179 has αἰ κ’ ἐδδυσμενίανς πε|ρα[θε͂ι κ]ἐˉκς ἀλλοπολίας (cf. SEG XXIII 567): 'if one is sold into hostile hands,... (Buck 1955: 327).

This section is damaged, particularly at this point in this line, as the close-up below shows:

Line 46 is the middle of the three lines in the close-up.

More recent editions have (ll. 46-50): vac. αἰ κ’ ἐδδυσ̣[άμενον] πέ|ραν[νδε] ἐκς ἀλλοπολίας ὐπ’ ἀν|άνκας ἐκόμενος κελομένοˉ τι|ς λύσεται, ἐπὶ το͂ι ἀλλυσαμέν|οˉι ἔˉμεˉν πρίν κ’ ἀποδο͂ι τὸ ἐπιβά|λλον.'If someone liberates another on account of an obligation towards him from some city because he was found out of the boarder ...' (the translation from a locally-obtained guidebook). Better, Willetts (1967: 44): 'If anyone, bound by necessity (ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης ἐχόμενος), should get a man gone away to a strange place set free from a foreign city at his own request,...'.We should not conclude too much about the attestation and distribution of a compound adjective from a gap on the stone (and on its casts).

"In general LSJ has hitherto been somewhat loath to draw attention to varieties of register (a notable exception of their willingness to indicate that a word is 'poetic': not always with a justification or propery consideration of dialect variation 67)."

67 "... Some, but by no means all, of the questionable entries in LSJ can be attributed to 'Athenocentrism'; the majority, however, reflect indolence and ignorance , and a failure to perceive that dialect words are not themselves poetic."

Monday, 27 June 2016

The inscription known as IG I³
1281 (= IG I² 1051) reads ΧΑΡΤΟ and no more. Since it is from Attica and dated to c. 450 BCE, the <Ο> could represent or <ου> or <ω>. If this is a noun, the first and the last can be ruled out on morphological grounds (I presume that the iota of the dative singular would have been written at this time).

Kurtz-Boardman, p. 123, fig. 22a

LGPN takes this as the genitive χάρτου of a name Χάρτης, as in the Index to IG I³ (cf., perh., papyrus(-roll) χάρτης m., Latin charta f.) and, as of today, knows only this instance. An alternative is suggested: Χάρτος (as in the Index to IG Supp. and IG I²); cf. χαρτός.

There are several names in χαρ- [χαίρω].

See Bechtel, pp. 469-470. See also Bechtel, pp. 468-469, for names related to χαρμή.

The Loeb blurb comments, "and Tryphiodorus (papyri reveal the correct spelling to be “Triphiodorus”) deals with The Taking of Troy in 691 lines, beginning with the Wooden Horse and ending with the sacrifice of Polyxena.".

M.L. West wrote in Gnomon 42.7 (1970), 657-661 at 661, of Livrea's edition of Colluthus: 'I hope that Livrea will persevere with his edition of Triphiodorus ; that he will give it a more comprehensive introduction, a less constipated apparatus, and a better-balanced commentary; and that he will stop spelling the poet's name with a y.'.

The noun in question occurs only in one manuscript of Mark the Deacon's Life of Porphyrius 98 (so Jerusalem Ms. H: others οἰκίσκος and D.A. Russell's extract, no. 100, in An Anthology of Greek Prose, pp. 279-281):

The Lobel-Page edition of Alcaeus consists of 4,888 words, while that of Sappho consists of 3,459 words (these figures are from the TLG). That's the fact, give or take; the interpretation is less straightforward,* if any can or, indeed, should be made. It depends both on chance survival of what happened to be in circulation in small set of locations and on deliberate, but selective, preservation.

So, more of Alcaeus has come down to us from Antiquity, whether on papyrus or as extracts and fragments, even of only a single word, that suited the needs of grammarians and literary critics.

Yet, editions of the two 'Great Lesbians' usually put Sappho before her (allegedly older) contemporary and add 'et SAPPHUS vel ALCAEI FRAGMENTA' 'et SAPPHO et ALCAEUS'. There is, as far as I know, no translation of Alcaeus alone, while there are several of Sappho alone.

* What, for example, counts as a word? A fully preserved lexical item, for sure, but what about partially preserved words that can be reasonably supplemented and what about a single letter or letter trace as the sole residue of a word?

Tuesday, 7 June 2016

John Chadwick wrote in the 'Case for Replacing LSJ' (BICS 11 (1994): 2):
"One of the worst features of the 9th edition was certainly not the decision of the editors at all, but of the publisher. Every user must curse many times a day the idea of saving a little space by grouping words in long paragraphs. It would matter less that each lemma does not appear at the same point in the column, if at least it were given in full in bold type. Alas, the lemma is often reduced to three letters, two or even one letter, which not even bold type can render easily visible to the searching eye. In a lecture given in Oxford in 1948 R. W. Chapman, the Secretary to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, under whom the project was launched, had the effrontery to claim credit for this astonishing lack of perceptivity. But this passage of his lecture was wisely omitted from the published text. What other damage he may have inflicted, I do not know."

This Chapman can also be found in the app.crit. to the OCT of Plato's Laws...

Such printing also obscures the accentuation in the ὑπάλ-, when followed by -ειπτρίς and -είφω, gives inexplicable, unnecessary, and impossible doubling of the accent on a single word (no enclitics are involved).

If that is possible, why should ὑπαλγέω, ὑπαλεαίνω, and ὑπαλεύομαι (all hyphenless) not be grouped under ὑπαλ- also, except on the criterion of a shared root and thus meaning? Cf. the ὑο- words which share a root, but have a range of meanings depending on the second element. Better still would be to divide at ὑπ-αλγέω, -αλεαίνω, -αλειμμα, etc.

The syllabification is a puzzling facet, since no less/other than H. Stuart Jones wrote 'Appendix V: Division of Greek Words', p. 75 in Horace Hart (M.A. Printer to the University of Oxford), Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, 19th edn. (5th for publication): London and Oxford, 1905.

Based on papyri of Bacchylides, Thucydides, and Hypereides, he gives three exceptions to the rule that a syllable ends in a vowel:
(1) the consonant is doubled: Συρακούσ-σας, πολ-λῷ, 'and so' Βάκ-χος, Σαπ-φώ, Ἀτ-θίς;
(2) the first consonant is a liquid or nasal (or, according to some, a <σ>): ἄμ-φακες, ἐγ-χέσπαλον, τέρ-πον, πάν-τες, ἄλ-σος; ἄν-θρωπος, ἐρ-χθέντος, ἀν-δρῶν; but βά-κτρον, κάτο-πτρον, ἐχ-θρός; θέλ-κτρον, Λαμ-πτραί.
(3) Compounds. 'For modern printing the preference must be to divide the compounds παρ-όντος, ἐφ-ῃρημένος, but ἀπέ-βη may stand as well as ἀπ-έβη.'

A different issue surfaces in αἰνό-δακρυς, ὁ, = foreg., IG12(7).115 (Amorgos) [2nd/1st c. BCE]. Note the absence of an indication of inflection (-υος cf. πολύ-δακρυς) and a date for the inscription. The foreg(oing) is αἰνο-γόνος child of praise, which is a very different meaning. Was there ever an entry for *αἰνο-δάκρυος with which 'foreg.' would have been appropriate? Cf., e.g., πολυ-δάκρυος, but note that there '= sq.' directs the reader to πολύ-δακρυς for the meaning.

Thursday, 2 June 2016

There are places in which τίθημι (better ἔ-θηκ-α) has the sense of its Latin cognate faciō (better fēcῑ). As LSJ s.v. B puts it 'put in a certain state or condition, much the same as ποιεῖν, ποιεῖσθαι, and so often to be rendered by our make:'.

Or, as Geoff Horrocks put it in his discussion of ἤθηκη in SEG XLVI 1313, the verb can mean 'make someone happy', but it cannot mean 'make a crown out of a lump of gold' (as facio can). The latter, as he notes, seems to be required in that inscription.

Wednesday, 1 June 2016

"Its [that is, The Greek Language's] completion was put off for over twenty years by the decipherment of the Linear B script, which gave us direct knowledge of Greek some five centuries earlier than Homer. Michael Ventris's brilliant discovery provided for two decades the material for a new and highly productive academic industry. Now that there are signs that the seam has been worked out and that, in default of new and rich finds, Linear B studies have virtually reached the end of the road, the time is ripe to incorporate the results into a general work on the Greek language [that is, the 1980 volume of that title]."The Greek Language. Faber and Faber. London and Boston, 1980: Preface, xi

Tuesday, 31 May 2016

One lecturer used to end each instalment of his lectures on Modern Greek with a simple ἀυτά!

There follow some comparanda with a different pronoun-adjective:P.Oxy. I 119. 14-15 (2nd-3rd century CE):
ἂμ μὴ πέμψῃς οὐ μὴ φά|γω, οὐ μὴ πείνω· ταῦτα.
'If you do not send it, I won't eat, I won't drink! So there!

Muhammad Ali Jinnah's reply (17 September 1944) to Gandhi’s contention (15 September 1944); “I find no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be a nation apart from the parent stock":

"We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by
any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of a hundred million
people, and, what is more, we are a nation with our own distinctive
culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture,
names and nomenclature, sense of value and proportion, legal laws and
moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and
ambitions – in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and
of life. By all canons of international law we are a nation."

Wednesday, 11 May 2016

So Lucretius 1.832 and 3.260. Horace, Ars Poetica, also addressed this point and others of lexical interest (ll. 47-72).

dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum

reddiderit iunctura novum. si forte necesse est

indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita rerum et

fingere cinctutis non exaudita Cethegis,

continget dabiturque licentia sumpta pudenter,

et nova fictaque nuper habebunt verba fidem, si

Graeco fonte cadent parce detorta. quid autem

Caecilio Plautoque dabit Romanus ademptum

Vergilio Varioque?ego cur, adquirere pauca

si possum, invideor, cum lingua Catonis et Enni

sermonem patrium ditaverit et nova rerum

nomina protulerit? licuit semperque licebit

signatum praesente nota producere nomen.

ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,

prima cadunt: ita verborum vetus interit aetas,

et iuvenum ritu florent modo nata vigentque.

debemur morti nos nostraque: sive receptus

terra Neptunus classes Aquilonibus arcet,

regis opus, sterilisve diu palus aptaque remis

vicinas urbes alit et grave sentit aratrum,

seu cursum mutavit iniquum frugibus amnis

doctus iter melius: mortalia facta peribunt,

nedum sermonum stet honos et gratia vivax.

multa renascentur quae iam cecidere cadentque

quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus,

quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi.

Words and meanings come and go. Cf. too 'The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.' -- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia.

'The best words in the best order', as my English teacher used to quote.

Other notes from the AP shall follow. For now, there is the plural of the personal name Piso (ll. 6 and 235, in reference to the father and his sons) and of the toponym Anticyra (ll. 299-301): nanciscetur enim pretium nomenque poetae,| si tribus Anticyris caput insanabile numquam| tonsori Licino commiserit (Loeb: 'for surely one will win the esteem and name of poet if he never entrusts
to the barber Licinus a head that three Anticyras cannot cure'). Cf. Persius 4.16.